Define your quality standards in 3 steps

When you decide to carry out compliance mystery shopping, you're looking to check that your standards as set out in your repository are compliant.

However, in some organizations, the repository is not always built, or even not always identified. Yet it is an essential tool, both for you and for the mystery shoppers. Our teams use this framework to establish your compliance criteria for evaluation.

Let's take a look at what a benchmark is, and above all how to turn it into a relevant questionnaire for a mystery visit.

Step 1 - Define quality standards

Before you can start building your repository, you need to understand the concept. What are standards? First and foremost, it's a framework that brings together all the quality criteria whose conformity you wish to assess.

It lists the standards you want to meet, which represent the structure of your ideal customer journey. These are the standards that will be checked during the mystery visits.

Quality criteria are your objectives, such as :

  • you are immediately greeted at the restaurant entrance;
  • the toilets are spotless;
  • staff uniforms are clean;
  • etc.

Once established, these objectives become quality criteria to be met. It is this framework that builds your quality reference framework.

The aim of a compliance mystery visit is to measure compliance with this service standard. In the event of non-compliance, action plans are put in place to remedy the shortfall.

Step 2 - Decide on the criteria to be used in the reference system

To build your quality repository, you need to be able to answer 2 questions at every stage of your customer journey:

  • What?
  • how?

The "What" is used to define the objective you want to achieve, and the "How" is used to define the framework and the means you're going to use to achieve it.

Define criteria in collaboration with teams

You need to list in detail all the stages of your customer journey, and above all the intentions you want to put into it, as well as the team actions you want to achieve. To do this, you can use internal documents such as training manuals or service charters, or launch an upstream satisfaction survey as a starting point.

Use your brand's DNA to define the ideal you want to achieve, as well as feedback from your operational teams to help you determine whether it's feasible in the field.

Don't hesitate to involve your teams in the construction of your repository. If operational teams are involved in its construction, they will be all the more inclined to take ownership of it and adhere to it. 

What's more, this co-construction ensures a better match between theory and reality in the field, thus limiting the risk of widening a gap that could prove counter-productive.

Ranking the criteria of the reference system

Not all the criteria in your reference system will have the same impact on the success of your customer journey.

Based on the same model as Maslow's Pyramid, your criteria will be prioritized into 3 main areas.

Fundamental criteria

A fundamental criterion is the basic, the minimum, the obvious. Its presence is logical, but its absence can shock and become a source of dissatisfaction for your customers.

It could be "Hello", "Goodbye" or "Someone looks me in the eye when they speak to me". As their name suggests, the fundamental criteria are an integral part of the reference system, its foundation.

Professional gestures

Business gestures must be integrated into the process, but the way in which they are used is fundamental. The actions to be taken in response to the process correspond to what is expected in order to be in line with the brand's standards.

Example: Making sure a customer has a reservation is part of the process, but asking for it in a positive way is part of the fundamentals.

Enchantment criteria

Once the first 2 criteria have been met, your standards have been met and are in line with your benchmark. What's delivered in addition corresponds to what the customer doesn't require or even expect.

It's the balloon given to an impatient child in a restaurant, it's the sales assistant who comes to your front door to help you without being asked, and so on. It's that little extra touch that creates positive emotion in your customers.

Classifying reference criteria by theme

This method is particularly useful when you want to track specific performance. If, for example, after training your sales teams, you want to compare their performance on a specific subject, this classification will make perfect sense.

You can then decide to apply a theme to the whole country, or by region, and set up specific action plans.

Step 3 - Designing the mystery visit questionnaire

As the result of a compliance mystery shop is scored, the mystery shopper must be able to answer the various questions with a yes or no answer. To achieve this, the questions asked must be as precise as possible, and not allow for interpretations that would bias the result.

For each question, you need to define the objective (or quality criterion) and the means of achieving it (or framing). The result should be a closed question allowing a yes or no answer. Here's an example.

  1. The objective (or quality criterion) 

A courtesy visit is made at least once during the meal.

  1. The medium (or framing)

The waiter came at least once during the meal to make sure that everything was fine and that the customer didn't need anything.

  1. The question

During your meal, a member of staff came to ask if everything was alright (Yes/No)

However, the mystery-shopping questionnaire does not consist of a litany of questions, one after the other. Most of them are accompanied by instructions to help measure the criterion (e.g.: specify when, during the meal, the member of staff should come and ask if everything is alright).

What's more, in the event of non-conformity, the mystery shopper can add a comment. To help with a better analysis of the criteria, these are pre-listed, but if our field expert wishes to comment on a point not included in the proposed list, he or she can add a personal comment.

The wealth of verbatims from our field experts is a real added value in our mystery shopper reports.

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AUDIT THE COMPLIANCE OF YOUR STANDARDS

The aim of compliance mystery shopping is to objectively and consistently measure the quality of the customer journey, by identifying your network's strengths and weaknesses.